The first major state of the Deccan, the great plateau of peninsular India, which bridged the gap between the Mauryan collapse and the later kingdoms and grew rich where its Deccan routes fed a booming trade between the Roman world and the East.
Around the first century of our era, a Roman writer named Pliny complained that India was draining the empire of its gold. Roman ships were riding the monsoon across the Indian Ocean to the western coast of India, and they were coming home loaded with pepper, gems, and fine cloth. In exchange, they paid in gold coin, and the coin did not come back. Some of that gold flowed into the Deccan, the high plateau at the center of the Indian peninsula. There it enriched the merchants, towns, and monasteries of the Satavahana world, the first great power that plateau ever produced.